


long way home

by ninemoons42



Series: long way home [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bookstore, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bookstore Owner Ignis Scientia, Dreams and Nightmares, El Dia de la Rosa, El Dia del Llibre, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Getting Together, Hopeful Ending, La Diada de Sant Jordi, Light Angst, M/M, Nockitty and Prompupper watch as their dads get together!, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Recovery, War Veteran Gladiolus Amicitia, War Veteran Ignis Scientia, a rose for love and a book forever, and they approve!, now with art!, saint george's day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 14:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14403639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Ignis and Gladio move through the dark nights, through a winter that refuses to give way to spring, and find in themselves the strength to reach out to each other at last.





	1. Ignis, one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [johanirae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/johanirae/gifts).



> The original poetry featured in this fic is mine :)
> 
> ///
> 
> Nockitty references [HERE](http://www.catori.ru/cats/fler/fler85/cat_023_700.jpg) and [HERE](http://petermorwood.tumblr.com/post/169657329612/felren13-madmaudlingoes-markv5-%D0%BC%D0%BD%D0%B5-%D0%BD%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%81%D1%8F).
> 
> Prompupper reference [HERE](https://www.petpremium.com/wp-content/uploads/ppbr/breeds/golden-sammy_profile_350x400.jpg).
> 
> ///
> 
> Art collaboration with Johanirae is up! Please click [HERE](http://johanirae.tumblr.com/post/173637925586/ffxv-illustration-inspired-by-ninemoons42-s) and show my friend lots of love!

Maybe it’s a dream, and maybe it’s not a dream, and maybe he’s finally waking up to the moment that he’s been dreading all along. 

The world around him is tinted green-gray, because the world around him is made out of wind-torn rock and the rough grit and grip of sharp sand-edges, and he’s peering out at the rocks, at the beeping box in a hollow in the sand, from multiple layers of ultimately useless protection. A transparent shield to cover his face; a pair of wraparound sunglasses. Armor, covering every inch of him, padded so thickly that he’s already sweating and feverish before he can even take high noon and the relentless drying scouring winds into consideration. Mittens on his hands that mean he’ll have to be clumsy, he’ll have to be ten and twenty times as careful as he normally would, so he can manipulate shears and snips and screwdrivers and -- in case of imminent detonation -- a sledgehammer and one last prayer for mercy.

Something about this entire scene is wrong, is the first thought in his mind. Something is wrong, even before he thinks about the box in the sand.

The box, beeping, lid pried open, dropped some few feet away. Bright red labels and faces painted on, giving way to gold-colored interiors. Perhaps it must have contained food in its first use, if the international black-on-white box of nutritional facts and nutrient values still legible on a side panel is anything to go by.

The rest of the box, bright and vibrant, like a macabre joke -- and the crumbs and all the other things the box must have held in its other uses are gone, and in their place is a welter of tattered tape and fraying wires. A display, red numbers ticking past at irregular intervals, and he doesn’t trust the countdown anyway -- he never has, not since the dummy bombs from training, not since the all-too-real bomb that left shrapnel and shattered rock in his commanding officer’s maimed hands. 

And beneath the countdown, still bulky enough that the wires and the tape have no hope of disguising its lethal purpose: a block of shaped explosive. Plain gray. Oily. Not for the first time, he curses the fact that the material is expressly designed so as to retain no fingerprints. 

Not for the first time, as he falls heavy and pained to his knees before the box and its countdown, he curses the fact that people are actively making the explosive. The money in it, the profits it stands for, are almost lesser offenses, compared to the sheer danger of it.

What does that make him, then, when it’s his job to confront those lumps of plain gray oily material, and to render them almost harmless? More than just his job: he volunteered to do this. He’s been volunteering to do this, every time he puts the cursed bomb suit on. He’s been volunteering to risk his life on the chance of high levels of heat stress, on the chance of the makeshift bomb blowing up right in his face, right from the start.

Snips in his hand and the wheels in his mind spinning more and more madly, as he tries to impose some kind of order, some prayer of logic, onto the improvised explosive device. The sun beats down on him, and the stares of the crowd on the outskirts of the intersection. 

He’s reaching out for the box when he hears that high-pitched whine, and he turns back to the rest of the squad, tries to scream out a warning --

He opens his eyes, and for a long breathless moment he can’t see anything but the shadows in his room. The shift and the play of a single car’s headlights, the rumble of its passage on the street outside his window. 

Mad beat of his heart. Mad pulse of the blood in his veins. He’s breathless and sweating and splayed out, frozen atop his sheets, hot tears refusing to flow away even when he tries to blink and clear his vision.

Thump, quiet, insistent, on the window: Ignis pries himself up from his flat pillows, from the shattered pieces of his dreams, and looks at the glass, and he can’t understand the shape of large ears and long tail and -- 

He says the cat’s name -- “Noct?” -- and the cat seems to reply by batting at the closed window once again. Black paws without a hope of a rhythm, only a powerful urgency -- tap, tap, tap, that propels him from the bed -- and he pulls the window open, just a crack, just for a moment.

And that’s more than enough time and more than enough space for Noct to slide into the room, tail held high, landing in a graceful crouch at his feet.

It’s Noct, all right, even in the rather unlikely event of the collar or the nametag getting lost: no other cat in the neighborhood has blue eyes as deep as ocean whirlpools, as deep as winter snow, as deep as shadows at high noon. No other cat in the neighborhood would climb him with such familiarity, or drape in sleek long lines of fine black fur around his shoulders. 

The weight of the cat, the presence of the cat, unlooked-for and unhoped-for, and Ignis asks the question that can’t be answered -- “Where have you been?” And it’s been days since he’s last seen Noct -- long enough that he’s started to get worried, long enough that he’s asked people like Iris and Aranea and Gladiolus to keep a weather eye out for wandering feline friends. 

To the bed: he sinks onto the foot and he hauls Noct off his shoulders, hauls Noct into his lap. The cat doesn’t even put up a token protest of showing all its teeth, of yowling softly at him -- the cat simply settles on his knees, sprawls across his crossed legs, and doesn’t stay still at all. 

Paws, moving kneading, calm and measured rhythm. Sleek muscles on the move as Noct turns tight endless circles over his skin. Tail, curling powerfully and briefly around his wrist, and then Noct is on the move again, arching up against him, butting its head up against the underside of his jaw.

This cat, this Noct, suddenly here, after days and days of absence -- this cat that’s darker than the midnight hours, darker than the terrible night that’s been choking him in his terrible dreams.

Days and days of silence in the apartment, broken suddenly and soothingly, as Noct purrs and the sound is soft and quiet and shivering, counterpoint to the mad tripping beat of Ignis’s heart.

And Ignis opens his eyes, not knowing when he’d closed them, not knowing when he’d let the tears fall. Sick sad stab of relief that spears through him, because the dream is only a dream and there was never a bomb that exploded in his face, that left him staggering in permanent shadow-shrouded twilight -- relief that’s soon drowned out in searing-jagged shame -- there was never a bomb to maim his body, but there were, there have been, so many broken and bleeding bodies left behind in the shrapnel and the shattered stones, the flash-fused jagged sands. The only thing is that he’s gotten out of his war alive, that he’s kept his senses and his reason, somehow, haunted though those might be. 

Twists and turns of his emotions -- and as they wash through him, as they jabber and shriek and slash through him, he’s upended over and over again, and he’s stranded on those torn terrible unfamiliar shores.

Touch of something cold against the tip of his nose -- he blinks, and Noct blinks back at him.

Slow, slow blink. The solemn regard of bright blue eyes like the hearts of newly-lit stars.

“I don’t even know where you’ve been, and I don’t know if you’re trying to make amends or, or,” and maybe he’ll be able to smile, if Noct decides to groom him, or pull a funny face. “You won’t catch me relenting so easily.”

Noct meows, as if perfectly understanding why his words are still shaking. As if the cat could know -- and how could the cat know about the nightmares, about the long hours of silence in the depths of the night -- tossing and turning in his bed, and no comfort to be found even in the words on their pages, the books of poetry like silent and helpless witnesses, piled onto the table next to the bed.

He pulls those battered and scratched frames on, and the world comes into clearer focus, but not his mind, which is playing tricks on him again: because he can banish the thoughts of his dreams, he’s learned to turn his back on the horrific not-memories, but in the here and now he can still smell blood drying on sun-baked rocks. 

Not even Noct and those insistent purrs can free him from the smell of bone-dust, of paper ash, of acrid smoke rising from charred metal. 

The strange smell of the fluids in his eyes -- the humours, he remembers them being called -- drip, drip, and heat flashing them into vapor, leaving behind ash-white residue on his cheeks, grit in the corners of his mouth.

He curses, then, doubting his mind once again. Hating the idea that the dreams are so vivid because somehow he’s lived through all those gory scenes. Impossible, impossible: the dreams tell him he’s mourned the broken and scattered bodies of his comrades, but the truth is that they’re the people who send him silly selfies and short videos of animals doing funny things on loop. 

False dreams, false memories: he knows that these are the remnants of the long haze in which he’d sat and stared and struggled to breathe, in the slow stultifying months of recovery, pushed flat into a hospital bed and the hours plodding by, each one as long and as slow as a year.

He almost throws himself backwards into his pillows to drown in his tears once again.

And maybe that’s what he wants to do right now, maybe that’s what he actually needs to do: maybe he just needs to cry out all his frustrations, all his pain, in the dead of the night -- he squints at the clock next to the bed, the supposedly soothing green-lit shapes of hands and numbers, fluorescing paint, and he’s still trapped on the dark side of midnight, somewhere in the hours before sunrise.

But Noct is kneading at him once again, butting up against him, insistent in the way a cat can be insistent, and this time Ignis feels the threat of claws pricking lightly.

The cat is not a threat. He tells himself that. The cat is not a bomb and not an enemy and not a threat.

But those claws are real, and he’ll end up needing to mend his clothes, if Noct keeps going.

He’s loathe to push Noct’s presence away and that leaves him with only one thing to do -- the unlikely thing to do. 

He passes a hand over Noct’s head, down that powerful curve of backbone, all the way to the twitching tail, and asks, “What do you want from me?”

In response -- the cat kicks him, lightly, with its powerful hind legs -- kicks him and then leaps, and the force of that leap is more than enough to take it across the room. Noct is now standing right opposite the window.

And Noct meows, once.

There’s something oddly compelling about that sound that he doesn’t often hear out of his cat, anyway: Noct prefers to communicate in pointed looks, in the flick of tail, in the twitch of ears.

The ears that twitch at him now, oversized triangles that are still startlingly soft to the touch, twitching and twitching as he pulls on the previous day’s shirt and trousers and shoes.

At the last moment, he huddles into his oldest coat -- strange to find it still in the depths of his closet, still hanging neat and pristine from clothespins and a sturdy hanger. The coat is his last reminder of the ceremonial of the military, the rites and the parades and the inspections. Ghostly shapes on collar and sleeve, where his rank insignia and unit patches used to be, and the outlines are all that’s left. The coat is made of thick black material, mostly water-repellent. Silver-braid edges and trim, and domed buttons to match, scuffed now, but still anchored down the torso in parallel lines, framing the center closure and its hidden clasps. 

Icy wind that blows down the back of his neck as he starts walking, and he’s grateful for the lining in the coat that keeps the rest of him warm.

Problem is, he doesn’t really know where he’s going -- doesn’t know how long he’ll have to stay out in these still-falling temperatures -- and all he knows is that he has to keep his cat in sight. No way of telling, after all, if Noct’s going to bolt again.

He walks, and shivers, and tries to figure out why the wind still tastes and feels like winter when they’re three weeks past the customary first day of spring.

Three weeks ago, and the red-numbered day on the calendar that now hangs in his office, decorated with outlined shapes of flowers. The book shop had been half-empty that day -- no one had ventured onto the streets, where the frost kept forming along the edges of the sidewalks -- and even those hardy few that had come in had been wreathed in the condensing clouds of their own breaths. 

In the here and now, he remembers refilling the coffee pot in the shop several times. He remembers Aranea holding on to an oversized stainless-steel travel mug, gloved fingers, and her face bent down to the steam curling up from the lid. He remembers Iris huddling in her layers, two jumpers beneath her chocobo-print coat. 

He remembers Noct refusing to be dislodged from his shoulders.

The contrast between the Noct of then and the Noct of now is stark -- Noct will not stay near him, and keeps hurrying and hurrying, and Ignis finds himself having to almost run. Finds himself having to chase Noct down the streets. He almost loses sight of the cat at an intersection, and he dashes across as soon as the pedestrians’ green light winks again, cool hue in the night -- he searches wildly in the nearby bushes and finally catches sight of Noct, sitting in a rooftop gutter, placidly washing a paw.

“Come on,” he says, as they pass into one of the smaller shopping districts. “Just, please, won’t you let me know what you want of me?”

And then he’s walking past a dimly-lit shop window: golden bulbs flickering listlessly in the upper corner, allowing him to cast a faint reflection in the glass.

That’s when he touches the epaulettes on his coat and -- stares at himself in the mirror, and the strange uneven drape of the shoulder seams.

The coat is too big for him, now.

“I can’t have lost that much weight; that doesn’t make sense,” he says, quietly. 

The quiet yowl at his feet sounds too much like a reply in the negative.

He sighs, and shivers, and tries to warm his hands in his pockets. “And what would you have me do?”

Noct yowls, again, and then starts walking away. Tail held high like a flag, like an order to follow, and Ignis can’t help but trail in that feline wake, wondering where he’ll be led this time.

And Noct seems to have an actual destination in mind: nimble paws and easy stride through the protective shadows of buildings, wind breaking harmlessly against the jutting corners, against the lowering eaves, so Ignis doesn’t have to suffer the worst of the dropping temperatures, and then they pass into a residential area -- 

Heart in his throat, Ignis watches as Noct leaps into the branches of the trees that bend and stoop over the unfamiliar streets -- the cat is a lean liquid shadow, purposeful, tail still an upright beacon in the night for Ignis to follow -- 

He’s long since left the echoes of his dreams behind him -- 

He turns the corner and catches sight of a different book shop, the books in the display window draped in cloth except for the one that’s front and center: and the name on the cover catches his eye.

“That’s new,” he says, quietly.

Properly speaking, the book isn’t really a book in the sense of hardbound covers and embossed titles: he’d almost call it a chapbook in its plainness and its small size. Pages enclosed between plain cardboard covers. A bare-bones frame on the front cover, a little like vines and a little like trailing long leaves, but he’s really focused on the name of the author.

_Aulea Leonis_

He reads the title of the book, quietly: “ _Wave-Tossed_.”

Breath. Blink.

“How could I have missed the news of this?”

But even as he’s voicing the question, softly enough that the wind tears the words from his mouth, he knows the answer, and it makes him hang his head. Makes him press his hand over his heart, heavy now with the weight of something like pain, something like guilt, something like shame.

Despite the abysmal weather, business has picked up at his book shop in the last few months, and that is in no small part due to Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, and her signing event, and her series of novels occupying the shelves right next to the till -- and she’d be a regular at the shop herself, if it weren’t for her book tour, that has now taken her partway across the world.

But she mails him order forms for all kinds of books in genres both familiar and unfamiliar, and no two pickup addresses are ever alike.

In her wake, other authors have asked to hold events in the shop, and more and more people have gone through the doors in search of all kinds of titles, and he’d enjoyed the influx of new faces and new people to talk to right until the point when his nerves had failed him -- his own literal nerves, beneath his actual skin -- and he’d fallen down right in the shop, in the space next to the till, and he’d narrowly missed banging his head on the swinging door between the back of the shop and the areas colonized by the books.

Maybe life would have gone on as normal if no one had seen him fall: but the shop had been full, then, and it had taken Aranea too long to hurry to his side and pull him back onto his feet.

He’d forced a smile, and forced himself to get up, and he’d retreated into the back office and closed the door, and -- maybe he hasn’t really come out of the shadows of that day yet. The hours of sitting without turning on a light. The hours of ignoring messages from -- Iris and from Cindy and from Gladio.

That fall -- and the subsequent visit to one of his specialist doctors -- is only three weeks in the past, and maybe those three weeks are still going on and on and on, like the winter that won’t let go. Maybe he’s still -- on the floor of the book shop where he’d landed, with pain hammering at his thoughts, and not just from the awkwardness of his landing, the sudden impact of his hip and his knee against the floors.

In the here and now, he doesn’t have his cane to lean on, so he stumbles to the tree that casts only the shadows of its lower branches onto the display and the little book of Aulea Leonis’s latest work, and leans heavily into it.

Concerned trill from right over his head.

“Not now,” he half-says, half-pleads. “Noct. I, I know you want me to go somewhere, but I can’t go on from here. Not without help.”

Soundless landing, the shape of Noct falling graceful and sure to the sidewalk.

That same quiet galaxy-regard, that keenness, that intensity, grave and disquieting and gentle -- and Ignis has seen people recoil from Noct’s gaze, when they’d run into it, from the back of an armchair or the top of a shelf, or from beside a stack of books. 

That compelling scrutiny, louder than yowls, than screeching.

And step by step he walks away from the tree and its support.

Walks on in Noct’s wake, and wonders where the cat might be leading him.

He quickly loses count of the number of times that he looks back in the direction of that plain book.

Tree, up ahead: he feels that he’s looking at something old, and patient, and enduring. Tall twisting gnarled branches, shaking in the movement of the wind, bare handful of leaves on those winter-dark limbs. Roots, thrusting up and out of the earth, and -- through the loose lattice of a waist-high fence -- he sees what lies in the shade of this bent tree.

Plots and pots covered in dark-stranded netting, and layers of something that looks very much like newspaper. A garden of ragged lines, a garden forced to sleep a little while longer.

He thinks of -- Gladio, and feels the shame burn even more in his chest, in his cheeks. He hasn’t heard from the man in a while, nor received any news of a puppy with golden and copper fur.

Other than asking him to help look for Noct, he hasn’t even made the time to speak with him.

So much for offering a helping hand, or a listening presence.

He’d reach out to the tree if he could, and rest, and try to think past the haze of cold, the haze of pain. Try to think about anything else, everything else, and not the pain or the nightmares or the bruises that have faded from his skin, but not from his mind.

As it is, all he can do is watch as Noct climbs the lattice of the fence, and leaps into the wintering garden, and disappears.

He doesn’t even have the strength to call out.


	2. Gladio, one

He looks up from the remnants of something that is either a very late dinner or a very early breakfast, and doesn’t know whether to cry or to laugh or to throw his empty plate in his father’s direction.

Clarus only turns to him with a knowing grin. “Well you know I’m obliged to wear some form of high-visibility gear, if I’m going out into the world.”

So he groans, and covers his eyes. “So you want to be visible from miles and miles away, in, in, what do you even call those things you’re wearing? Are those actual colors?”

“Hey. Be grateful I’m only wearing pink shoes. It would have been a pink shirt otherwise.”

He can’t help but flinch away from the idea. “Fuck no.”

The wrinkles in his father’s face deepen even further as his grin widens. “Ask your sister, this whole thing was her idea.”

“I refuse to believe that,” he says, and he’s badly, badly tempted to just turn his back on his father. Neon-pink clogs, and denim trousers cut off in fraying lines just below the knees. White undershirt that offers no relief, because hanging unbuttoned from those shoulders that are now shaking with laughter is a button-down printed in loud, loud yellow and green leaf-shapes. 

Slumped beside the wheelchair is the familiar shape of a rucksack, its sturdy cords knotted neatly and securely together. 

By the time he looks over again, the smile and the laugh have flattened away into a look of gentle concern, and it’s a look that he’s been seeing a lot around here, and not just on his father. 

He’s grateful for that look, for that expression, any way he can get it, and especially from Clarus, whose shoulders are now slumped in what he thinks might be the weary understanding that they’ve come to share, in tumblers of amber-golden liquor, in cups of tea and the scent of sunrise on a mulched garden. 

So he goes to sit on the floor next to his father’s wheelchair, and leans his temple against the cool still metal frame, and when a gnarled hand lands in his hair he pushes up into it. 

He almost wishes he could pour his father a drink. 

Outside the windows, outside the doors to the garden, he can see the thin long ragged lines of clouds obscuring the perennial stars. 

“Last chance, Gladio, you still have time to pack a bag,” he hears Clarus say, quiet and almost contemplative, in complete and utter contrast to the screaming colors of his outfit.

He leans his forehead against his drawn-up knees. “Thanks but again, no thanks.”

Grunt, far too quiet, in this house that’s already quiet and still and most of the way to empty. “I’m still not entirely convinced we should be leaving you here at home.”

“I need to be in familiar places, and where you’re going I won’t know anyone or anything, which is the exact opposite of familiar,” he says, and he tries to be patient about it, even though this isn’t the first time he’s said the words. “You and Iris both. I’m just surprised you didn’t end up going to the exact same beach.”

“I did tell you we’ll still be on the same coast, right, she and I? But then, what does that mean, when the coast in question’s miles and miles long. That’s the other part that worries me; if you call us because you need help, it’ll take us at least a day to come back.”

He shrugs, as best as he can in his hunched-over position. He’s not used to sitting like this, but this is the only way he can be this close to his father right now. “So I’ll call someone else first. My psych. She said she was going to be seeing patients over the long weekend anyway.”

“No vacation for doctors?”

He shrugs again, and looks up at last, meeting his father’s eyes and the weathered lines of his face. “I can ask her.”

“If that’s what you want. I am only worried for you, son. You know that’s my job these days.”

Something that isn’t laughter and isn’t sobs bubbles up in his throat, and he swallows it back down with difficulty, and all he does is reach up for his father’s gnarled hand. “Funny, you know, I was just thinking, I can’t bear pity but you guys never look at me with anything like that, and don’t think I don’t appreciate that about you. You and Iris both. I can see and I can feel that you worry about me. I’m grateful for that. Still, you know you gotta live your lives.”

He takes a deep breath, and adds, “I wouldn’t be happy anyway if you were stuck here on my account, or if she was. I couldn’t live with myself, seeing you chained here and fading away. That shit’s no good for you and no good for me either.”

“And what will you do, so you don’t fade away yourself?”

He shrugs, a little. “There’s always the training. And friends to see.”

But as he says it, he knows he’s only sort of telling the truth.

Because there’s a friend in this same city who’s sort of gone missing -- who’d fallen in his book shop -- Iris has only ever heard the details at second-hand and she’s still beating herself up over having had that day off from work.

If she worries about bruises, those fade away: Gladio’s thinking about deeper wounds, darker ones, and those take far too long to heal, and -- what was it, anyway, that Ignis had said, about having bad days and surviving them?

He’s startled out of his thoughts when Clarus’s phone rings practically next to his ear -- he doesn’t yelp, but just barely, and he catches a glimpse of an apologetic grimace. 

His father’s voice: “Yeah?” 

Hoarse high rasp of a woman’s voice, in response. “We’re turning onto your block, Clar.”

“On my way out, Melia,” is the response.

So Gladio gets to his feet, and picks up the rucksack in one hand, and leans over to wrap the other arm around his father’s shoulders. Says, sternly, “I mean it, if you don’t come back here looking like you spent hours and hours just lying in the sun -- I promise I’ll kick your ass.”

“Iris’s too, I’m assuming? I should be here when that happens, at least the two of you will be more entertaining than all my friends combined. I’ll make popcorn and cheer her on.” Click of a fatherly tongue, only partly mocking. “Also, did you remind her to wear sunscreen?”

“Went with her to buy a big bottle. _And_ that green goop for afterwards. What’s it called?”

“Aftersun balm. Got that, too.”

He goes with Clarus to the front door, and hugs him again. “I don’t get what’s fun about driving to the beach in the fucking middle of the night but -- promise me you’ll try to have a good time, Dad.”

And that answering grin this time is bright and sharp and real. “I plan to!”

Starlight falling faint on the doorstep, on the road; there’s a motley group of wide-awake grins in the windows of the van that’s idling at the curb. He stows the rucksack without any difficulty -- it weighs very little, despite its bulk -- and then he has to chuckle once again as someone activates the ramp for wheelchair access. Whir and clank of the machinery, overcoming the roar of the engine. 

“See you soon,” he says, and he means it for all of the people in the van, not just his father. 

He doesn’t turn back into the house until they’re long out of sight.

And that’s when he hears the click of nails. Transition from the polished floors of the house and its rooms, to the cemented layered thick on the ground beneath his feet. Big paws, still ungainly on the move, heading his way.

He still has to laugh because he’s looking too far down, when Prompto comes to a smooth halt next to him: his eyes used to land right on target, on a familiar canine grin and a bright adoring gaze, but now the first thing he sees is shaggy tufts of hair trailing from a broad chest, and he has to glance upwards to find the patient curve of that lolling-open mouth, the flop of that pink tongue.

Has it really only been a few months? But Prompto’s hit two growth spurts already, or maybe three: that stocky frame now comes up to Gladio’s knees, not sitting but standing. Puppy fat gone and melted and turned into muscle, into powerful rapidfire energy -- he thinks he might have to look into the local agility trials, and he amuses himself with the thought of cheering Prompto on through all kinds of obstacles, ears and tail flopping all over the place and that constant smile all throughout.

Always the weight of doggy treats in his pockets, everywhere he goes, even when he’s doing nothing more than crossing from room to room within the house -- and he unwraps one, a biscuit in the shape of a cartoon bone in golden brown, flecked with various shades of green. Raises an eyebrow in the direction of his dog. “Not getting this one too easy, though, you gotta do a few things for me first,” he teases. “Roll over.”

Ungainly the dog isn’t. Prompto rolls over twice and grins again, paws in the air, tongue stuck out.

“Good, now play dead,” Gladio says.

More clicking as Prompto rolls back onto a still-pudgy belly. Splayed-out shape, all four legs flat to the ground.

Gladio laughs, and takes a picture, and tosses the treat to Prompto -- it’s astonishing, the transition from flat pancaked puddle of dog to the nimble arc that flies past him, snatching the treat neatly out of mid-air to land in a crouch.

And from astonishment he just starts straight-out chuckling as Prompto crunches through the treat in less than a minute. The noises of chewing and swallowing, echoing in the quiet of the night.

When the treat’s no more than a scatter of crumbs, Gladio says, softly, “Heel.”

Crosses over the threshold and back into the house -- he walks past the kitchen and his own dirty dishes, the last cup of tea that his father must have been nursing before he left -- and makes his way to the daybed. Kicks off his shoes and lies down, and taps his chest.

Wooden frame, newly stuffed cushions, new slipcovers -- and the whole thing creaks in protest, but only a little, when Prompto climbs up onto him. Head and front paws across his ribcage, and the rest sprawled out in a messy, but not ungainly pile.

Scrubbing a firm hand over the top of Prompto’s head, he allows his thoughts to drift.

Sand, in odd colors like pink and dark gray and -- once, but where had it been? -- black, in the creases and crevices of his fatigues, spilling out of the pockets of his trousers, gumming up the zippers on his tent and on his backpack. Salt silvering his hair and that of all the others he’d run through training camps with: he remembers, he knows he’s been sent out to various coasts to learn about amphibious assault, but he can’t for the life of him remember which coasts or which beaches those had been on. Drinking by the seaside and staying up all night just to see the sun rise over glittering ocean and soft shore -- for which he’d taken his licks and his demerits, of course, but hadn’t it been worth it every time?

He can’t remember, and maybe he ought to be worried about it. Maybe he’ll have to add that to the list of topics he can look up on the Internet, or talk to his psychiatrist about -- but on the other hand, it’s not a list of things to worry about. There are other things on the list, too.

He can remember things like -- conversations about going out fishing. Conversations about wooing people by wavesong and moonlight. He remembers, vividly, a night of singing silly love songs to an audience of fishermen and the shadow-shapes of marine life, barely illuminated by flickering lanterns.

Has Clarus ever tried fishing? He’s never had the mind for it, himself -- he thinks he’d be only mildly interested in things like sailing, or surfing. The truth is, the sea doesn’t really hold any interest for him, and the merciless sun would only remind him of all those training camps, of the summers he’d bent himself out of shape to become fit.

Better to be lazy, he thinks, and that’s approximately when he forgets about the rest of the world, and when he opens his eyes again the world’s gone even darker and his dog’s nowhere nearby, and he whistles, low and quiet, and -- there’s no immediate response forthcoming.

Time, time, what time is it? He’s tossed about on the waves of the hazy time between sleeping and waking, and his unfocused eyes land, almost as if carefully and gently drawn, on the photograph on the mantel.

Oh.

Maybe that’s why he feels so odd about the seashore, about standing in that space between the land and the water, that space where the winds blow in every possible direction.

Shell-shaped silver bead suspended from a fragile-looking chain: the one ornament his mother is wearing, in the photograph. 

He crosses the room, and stands contemplatively before her, hands together in the small of his back.

His mother, toiling in her garden with the soil clinging to her wrists, collecting under her fingernails, and all the while maybe she’d been thinking of salt-breeze and salt-wave, where the flowers that she’d grown couldn’t survive. Salt to season her favorite fruits, and salt to scour away the cares of the day.

That’s the more urgent question to ask, he decides, and it’ll keep for however long it’ll take for his father to come home from his summer trip.

In the meantime: the minutes and the hours are rolling inexorably on towards sunrise, and he still doesn’t know where his dog has gone -- until a movement catches his eye and he turns to fully address the door into the garden.

The shadow of Prompto, sitting quiet and alert beneath the acacia tree.

And something low to the ground, headed unerringly in the dog’s direction -- 

He opens the sliding doors as quietly as he can, and as soon as he steps into the garden he catches a glimpse of blue, galaxy-electric, galaxy-compelling, far too familiar.

“You,” he says, “you’ve gone missing again,” and he looks at the imperious black shadow sitting next to Prompto. “Where the hell do you go, and why do you keep leaving your human alone? He needs you, you know.”

“Gladio?”

That voice, familiar in its hidden warmth -- but why do the edges of the words tremble?

Lattice, fencing, between him and the source of that voice -- 

Wind that roars in the branches, in the stubbornly clinging leaves, of the acacia tree -- wind that tears he clouds away and finally the starlight isn’t so faint any more, and there’s enough to see by, now that his eyes have completely adjusted to the darkness of the late hour -- 

On the other side of the fence, a figure in black and silver and falling-down hair. Wide wide shocked eyes behind smudged lenses. Hand over mouth, and even in the night he can see the tremor in those fingertips. 

“Ignis,” he says. 

“I thought my mind was playing tricks on me.” Step, step -- he watches Ignis approach, close enough that he can catch an arm in a brief fierce grip. 

“Maybe your cat was.” He tilts his head in the direction of Noct, quiet by Prompto’s side.

“Oh, that goes without saying.” And: “I do owe you an apology, I think. And possibly more than one explanation.”

“I don’t know about owing,” he says. “I do know I told you that you could come here, if you needed to, if you wanted someone to talk to. Is this one of those times?”

“I, I don’t know.”

“So yeah, it is.”

There are no gates to break the line of the fencing, and he shakes his head a little, and adds, “Come around to the front door. I can let you in there.”

“I -- yes.”

Hard to turn his back on Ignis, when the starlight seems to fall so cruelly into the harsh lines radiating from his scars, but he forces himself to move -- and still the dog and the cat beneath the acacia stay exactly where they are. Now the lean shadow of Noct is more than dwarfed by the quiet shape of Prompto, and maybe he’ll have time and proper light to observe them in.

Later. For now -- he crosses back into the house, and gets the hot water started, before heading for the front door.

“Nice coat,” he says, when he opens it to the hurrying shape of Ignis, stepping past him and out of the wind, out of the chill of the night.

“Did you ever wear yours?”

“Some,” he says, shrugging, one-shouldered. “Last time I did, though, it was the day I finished my service. They let me keep it. It’s in here somewhere.”

“I had forgotten I still had this. Will you mind if I kept wearing it? I, for some reason I can’t stop feeling cold.”

“Right, well, come on in, you need to get warm.” He leads the way to the kitchen and clears away the plates and the remnants of his meal, and as he finishes with that task the water in the kettle comes to a high whistling boil and he counts three seconds, four, five, before turning the flame off and looking for the tea things.

There’s a small collection of teacups in one of the kitchen cabinets -- Iris’s half-begun idea -- but he reaches past those mismatched patterns for silver cradling glass. Wreaths etched into the metal, and the outward curve of the rim on each glass -- he carefully runs those under the hot-water tap to rinse, and then pulls out the same container of tea-leaves from earlier. 

“Is there anything I can do to help?” he hears Ignis ask.

He shakes his head, gently. “Maybe later. Just get warm if you can. You want a blanket or something?”

“Ah. No need. Your kitchen is -- a soothing place, and it’s certainly warmer than mine.”

Teapot, tea leaves, hot water, and he brings everything to the table, and sits next to this unexpected presence of Ignis. “I keep thinking my mom really was on to something, when it comes to this house. Dad told me, you know. This place? It’s all her idea. All the rooms, the little space for the garden, the tree. Everything’s on one single floor and all the corridors are wide enough to play tag in. She, she must have insisted that this was the best place to make into a home. And, well, you can tell me if she succeeded.”

“Surely I couldn’t presume,” is the hushed answer. “But I wish that I could tell her that I like this kitchen very much.”

“Same.”

Scent of violets and orange-peel rising, and that means the tea is ready to drink, and he pours into the glasses. Pushes one towards Ignis. “Sugar?”

“Thank you, no.”

Hunched shoulders, still, and he doesn’t stop himself from reaching out to one. “You remember what I said?”

“About as much as I remember my own words,” is the faint reply, after a long moment. “I meant to apologize.”

He blinks, and puts his tea down. “What’d you do? I don’t remember that you’d done anything.”

Sliversharp smile, that seems wrong, that seems like a mockery. “Precisely. I, didn’t I say that I wanted to be your friend? That I might be someone you could speak to? But I’ve been so busy I hardly have time for myself, and then, then there was that incident in the shop, and I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting everyone as a consequence.”

“You don’t have to talk about it, not if you really don’t want to.”

“You’re right, I don’t -- but I owe you that apology still.”

Worn down, impossible as it seems: fading around the edges, crumbling, Gladio thinks, the longer he looks at Ignis. Impossible, this man with the scents of yellowing pages and aged leather on his hands, sitting here and being far too quiet.

He places his hand on the table, next to Ignis’s tea glass. Fingers open, palm up.

No expectations, he thinks.

He’s still surprised when Ignis takes that offered hand -- and in both of his own. Scrape of the glass as it’s set aside, and soft long sigh of exhaled breath, and hair falling to obscure those downcast eyes.

“Thank you,” he hears Ignis say, after a long moment, or perhaps it’s a short eternity. “I truly wasn’t hoping for, for anything like this, in this night.”

“So take it,” he says, just as quietly. “No need to explain yourself, and no need to apologize either.”

“I’ll try my best.”

After a while he thinks Ignis finally stops shivering.


	3. Ignis, two

“Good morning,” he says, when he hears the front door of the shop open and then close. “If you’ll only wait a moment, I’ll be right with you.”

The noise and the rush of the process of making coffee: he’s calmed by it. He’s grateful for the steps and the routine of it, that now feels ingrained into his very bones.

Sometimes, though, he thinks about the scent of violets, like a caprice, like a beautiful playful taunt, electrifying one moment only to disappear, and then reappearing in an even more glorious riot.

The routine is easy to follow, even when he’s running short on sleep -- but he’d spent the previous night in Gladio’s kitchen once again, grateful for the quiet, grateful for the tea.

A habit, or the beginnings of one, in tentative trailing-off conversations.

And he’s grateful, too, for the sight of Gladio picking up the silky-furred bulk of his dog and pretending to do lifts -- Prompto grinning all the while, as if content to be picked up and made kind sport of -- and he smiles in the here and now, still surprised by the passage of time, and the change from the ungainly puppy tripping over its own paws, to the graceful rolling gait of the dog that now comes up to Gladio’s knees.

Chime of the coffeemaker, and he pours himself a cup. Carefully carries it out to the counter.

Elegant tall shadow in the corner: a bell-shaped sleeve on the move, fingers running over the spines of the books in the references section.

He has a moment to forward a cat video from his friends to Gladio and to Iris, and then there are steps approaching the counter, and a warm voice speaking: “My friends were right: you do make a point out of keeping all kinds of titles here. I wasn’t expecting to find this.”

“I wasn’t expecting to find it, either,” he says, reading the title of the book. _A Practical Reference for Sailors’ Tasks and Customs_ , in silver letters on a handsome green cover. 

And then he looks up and feels the world stop dead in its tracks.

Red highlights and a scattering of silver strands in the short braid of hair pulled forward over one shoulder. Blue jacket, high-collared, with gold stitching on the shoulders and on the wrists. Necklace shaped to look like a length of fine rope, silver and gold intertwined. Point of her chin and the elegant lines of her face, serene blue eyes, every detail familiar to him.

“Good morning,” Aulea Leonis says, after a moment. “You’re the shop owner, I take it.”

“I am. Ignis Scientia at your service, Miz Leonis.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” and she offers her hand, and he reaches out to shake it. “And please, call me Aulea -- I insist. Although that’s a little rude of me, I would say. Especially when I’m actually here to speak with you.”

“Me,” he says, as mildly as he can, because he doesn’t want her to hear the shock and the delight that’s making his stomach churn, pleasant though the sensation might be.

“Yes. You and I have a friend in common. Cindy Aurum?”

He smiles, and thinks of the clever, amused spark in the girl’s eyes. “Yes. How is she, if I might ask? I haven’t seen her in some time.”

“I believe she said she was on her way back from a visit to her grandfather. He’s doing very well, these days. I’d hoped to wait for her return so that she could introduce us properly, but I’ve got to leave in a few days, so I’ve come here entirely on my own. I hope it’s no trouble.”

“None at all, truly,” he says, and then he can’t entirely hide the shake of his hand on the keys of the cash register, on the coins heaped in the drawer. “I’m hoping to get in some new stocks of your books in the next few days.”

“Oh, I’ll have to remind my publisher to hurry and get those out to you. And that is, in fact, the reason why I’ve come.”

“I’m all ears,” he says, with a smile.

“This is just the sort of place I have in mind, to sign books in. But, but not in the style of a big event, and lines snaking out the door. Forgive me, that does sound like I’m not happy to talk to the people who buy my books. But I, I find myself growing weary of those, these days. I know they’re necessary, and I still enjoy doing them, when they’re well-managed. But I don’t always have the strength or the endurance for them, you see.”

“I do know how you feel.”

Small tight smile in return. “So I came to see if you had any of my books now, because I thought perhaps I’d sign the whole lot on the sly, and just -- leave them here, like the good kind of surprise.”

He has to turn away when he laughs. “You won’t believe me when I tell you, but -- I did put in an order for your new collection, and those arrived two days ago.”

“I didn’t see any,” she says.

“That’s because none of them survived to make it to my shelves. I didn’t even have any copies to display in the window -- every single one was spoken for as soon as I put the word out to my usual customers. So the shipment that’s on its way -- it’s the second one, the one I’d had to order in a hurry.”

Frown, that deepens the lines in her face. “You’re entirely serious.”

“I am, at least about that first order. I couldn’t even keep a copy for myself, or one to give to a friend. I had to let all of the books go. There simply weren’t enough to go around.”

The dismay on her face is almost sweet and almost funny -- until it vanishes into a firm resolve, and he watches her reach into her purse and pull out a single copy of _Wave-Tossed_.

And it’s his turn to be dismayed, and he quickly says, “I didn’t say that to put you out, or to give you any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all; you didn’t know I was going to be here anyway.” Flash of a silver-banded black pen, and the broad nib trailing dark-green ink. “Ignis, you said your name was?”

“Yes. But, Aulea, if I may,” he says, making the decision on the instant. “If you’ll insist on this, then, thank you, thank you, truly. And -- and please, will you sign it to my friend?”

He writes _Gladiolus Amicitia_ on a scrap of paper and pushes it towards her. 

Watches her write, and tap the cap of the pen against her cheek, and add: _May you always walk with your truth and with the freedom to share your truth._

“I will tell my publisher to hold the shipment intended for you,” she says, when she looks up again. “I’ll sign the books first and then have them sent on by express delivery. I hope that’ll be all right?”

“Yes,” is all he can say, and he’s nothing but moved.

“I will drop in again, I promise, as soon as I can come back,” she says, and then she’s gone.

He can’t, he can’t resist, and he quickly crosses the shop and flips the sign in the glass window to _Closed_ \-- and just as he’s pulling down the shades Noct glides into view on the doorstep, and he quickly lets the cat in, and locks the door.

“Your timing is impeccable as usual,” he murmurs, as soon as he’s sitting in the back office.

He’s careful and reverent when he opens the book, and when he runs a fingertip over the lines of Aulea’s signature, the letters spelling out Gladio’s name.

The poem that gives the collection its title appears at the very end of the book, and he reads it, in a quiet voice, to the cat that washes its tail as he speaks:

if I walk by the rocky shore  
and wash my weary feet in its waves  
will the wild winds allow me to hide away my tears?  
or at least can I say,  
the salt gathers in the corners of my eyes  
and blots out all the world I once knew,  
and all the world that I know now?  
the wind whispers the words I hid away.  
the wind whispers those old promises to me.  
the waves splinter, and break into foam,  
and the words shiver away.  
the waves took away that which I held fast to my heart,  
that which I thought I’d knotted and held close,  
and I have run from the salt, since.  
and now the waves speak to me in thousands of voices  
now the waves look like all the homes I’ve ever built and ever lost  
and I dare not fall into those words  
I dare not answer those longing cries  
I dare not follow that salt-trail home.

Not a crack that he hears in his own voice until after, when he says, “Oh.”

He reads the poem again, and then once more, just to remember the rhythms of the words, just to remember the mourning in every line.

Clear sound of his phone, ringing, suddenly, and he bolts upright, and doesn’t miraculously fall out of his chair.

The name on the display is a surprise, too, and he swipes to accept the call, and says, breathlessly, “You, too? How did you know?”

“Know what? What do you mean?” Gladio, sounding winded and perplexed.

“Am I intruding on you?”

“No, and I don’t know why you’re asking me that when I’m calling you. Something wrong?”

“The exact opposite of wrong,” he says, and he lets himself smile. “You’ll never guess who was just in the shop.”

“Lay it on me,” he hears Gladio say.

“Aulea Leonis.”

Silence, that stretches, and then: “No fucking way.”

“Yes fucking way,” Ignis says, and he’s laughing as he says it. “I, I’m telling you, you could have knocked me over with Noct’s paw, or Prompto’s, when I looked up and there she was on the other side of the counter.”

“Oh shit, she’s gone?”

“She is, she said she couldn’t stay long. But I need you to come here to the shop immediately.”

“Oh _shit_ ,” he hears Gladio say again. “Shit. Yeah, yeah, I’m on my way.”

“Gladio,” he adds, just in the instant before the call clicks to an end.

“Yeah?”

“Why did you call me?”

“Nothing really. Just checking in.”

“Thank you.”

And he smiles, and reverently closes the chapbook, and sets it aside on his desk, to wait.


	4. Gladio, two

Pale imitation of sunlight only just warming his skin as he jogs along, and he doesn’t know why he’s running, why he’s already so exhilarated when he’s only just turned the corner and the tree that shelters his flower garden is still visible when he looks over his shoulder -- he’s only aware of the cool morning, of the rollicking nautical gait of Prompto running close by his side.

He catches himself wishing he’s still got Ignis on the phone: the bright words, the bright shock -- he’s certain he’s never heard Ignis sound like that, buoyant, like walking on foam-kissed waves, like the sweet high song of a perfect moment in the sun, in the middle of bright grass.

As he and Prompto run through another intersection, he catches sight of a flower shop -- more specifically, he catches sight of the roses in the display, and he gives in to the impulse that rises in him.

“Stay,” he says, and Prompto grins that happy canine grin, and curls into a contented circle of fur beneath the green-painted awning.

The boy behind the counter is arranging chrysanthemums in a vase, vibrant red-domed heart surrounded by starbursts of quill-shaped petals tipped in white.

“Those look good,” he says. “I grow a different kind, or I’m going to. Mine are supposed to be more like pompoms, or those large round globe-cluster things.”

“I like those, too,” the boy says. “But we’re a little famous for these spider mums.”

“I can tell,” he says. “Can you give me the biggest one you’ve got of those, in the middle of, I don’t know, roses?”

“Certainly!”

“You don’t have to tie it up in, in paper or anything. Just a ribbon, so they don’t fall out all over the place.”

“Something elegant coming right up,” the boy says, and Gladio watches him make up the bouquet, and the roses surrounding the -- spider chrysanthemum? -- are deep red and give off a faintly spicy scent.

“Thanks.”

Prompto chuffs happily at him when he comes back out on the sidewalk, and doesn’t stop even when he says, “Now we can’t run, because I don’t want to lose these flowers before I can give them away.”

But that sedate pace is agony, and he sort of wonders if he’ll still catch Ignis in that radiant mood by the time they actually get to the shop -- not to be mean, or to be rude -- it’s just that he’s intimately familiar with mood swings, and the suddenness of them, and the extremes of those moods.

He wants a chance at seeing Ignis’s moods, and maybe offering what help he can through those moods.

Now the scent of tea at home reminds him of Ignis’s presence, too.

The sign in the front door of the book shop says _Closed_ , when he arrives on the stoop, and he knocks on the glass, once.

Wag of Prompto’s tail, steady sweep, and he looks up and into the remains of a red flush still lingering in Ignis’s forehead, in the angle of his jaw. “You didn’t run all the way here?”

“Just part of it. I had to stop running after I got this,” he says, and he just thrusts the flowers into Ignis’s outstretched hand. “I, don’t ask me why, or what these are for. I thought you’d like them, is all.”

“Then I won’t ask. And, and Gladio -- let me thank you. I, these are lovely, I just don’t know where I can put them.”

There is still only one chair in the back of the book shop, so he half-perches on the corner of the desk and takes a deep breath, and watches Ignis as he takes a deep breath of the roses. 

He looks like he’s stepped free of all of his cares, just in that moment, just for all of a stolen instant.

But then Ignis places the flowers carefully onto the desk -- and he sees the other item that’s sitting out in plain sight on that same surface, thin plain paperbound volume, and he remembers why he’s even here in the first place. “That -- you weren’t kidding,” he says, and points to the book.

“I told you the story, didn’t I?” he hears Ignis say. “That I’d put in another order for her books and -- none of them actually stayed here?”

“Yeah, you said you’d had to send every single copy out as soon as the box got in.”

He’s surprised when Ignis makes an apologetic face. “What I didn’t tell you was that I’d saved, or I’d been planning to save, a copy of _Wave-Tossed_ for you. But clearly I didn’t give you anything, did I? The truth is, I didn’t give you the copy because after I’d gone through all my orders there were none left to give.”

“So this is,” he says.

“This is the copy that Aulea left behind this morning, yes.”

The chapbook in Ignis’s hands -- he watches Ignis brush fingertips over the title, before handing it over. “She was going to sign that for me. I, I may have asked her to write something else instead.”

The bottom drops out of Gladio’s stomach, like the knowledge of a perfect shot, the knowledge of a successfully accomplished mission, and he wipes his hands on his trousers before taking the book from Ignis, before opening it to the frontispiece.

_To Gladiolus: May you always walk with your truth and with the freedom to share your truth. AL_

His name, on the first page of this book.

He’s broken from his reverie by Ignis’s hands on his shoulders, gently pulling him up. 

“What?” 

“Go sit,” is Ignis’s answer. Tilt of his head in the direction of the chair. “Sit, and read that, and tell me if you find anything else that’s good. I, I only read the last poem. I hope you’ll perhaps find time to tell me about the rest, and recommend a favorite or two?”

Blink. Blink. “You haven’t read this yet?”

“It’s yours, not mine, so -- of course I didn’t read it. Just the end, as I said.” Squeeze of those hands, warm against his skin. 

He freezes for a very long moment, long enough that Ignis smiles again, and the lines radiate from the corners of those worn and kind and gentle eyes, and seems to turn away, seems to reach for the flowers.

The words come, unexpected: “Thank you. For this book. But -- but you can’t just say it’s just mine.”

“No?”

Tilt of that head, again.

And suddenly he knows what to do.

He holds the chapbook up between them, the bottom edge in his hands. 

“Gladio, what -- ”

“Grab the other end,” he says, as gently as he can, because he’s hoping he won’t fumble this, he’s hoping he won’t fuck this up. “Please.”

So he watches as Ignis takes the top edge of the book and tilts his head again. “And now?”

“Our book now,” he says, fighting the urge to wince. The words aren’t anywhere near the right ones he wants or needs. “My name on the front page. That wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for you. So the book should be yours, too.”

“You’d do that? Is that what you want?”

“Yeah,” and that he can say, firmly, with everything he’s got.

Long long long quiet moment, and Ignis looking at him, and the need to keep meeting his eyes.

“All right then. Yours and mine.”

He smiles back, when Ignis smiles at him, and -- and there’s no fear in him, no hesitation, when Ignis seems to be falling towards him -- foreheads touching, and he wills all of his own warmth into Ignis, thinking of that night and the image of Ignis shivering in that black coat.

He watches Ignis’s eyes close, and hears him sigh.

And the words, afterwards: “I really do need to be going back to work -- but you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

So he pulls away, and smiles again. “I’ll be right here.”

Ignis’s answer, left behind in the whirl of him picking up the flowers and heading into the book shop proper, trail of red petals and lingering scent of roses: “And so will I.”

So he opens the book, and turns past the page inscribed with his name, and reads.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I was always planning to finish up this set of stories with the actual getting-together part, but why'd I post this on 23 April? Briefly, it's because of my own version of celebrating the feast of Saint George (yes, as in the guy that killed the dragon), after the manner of people in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia in France. See also the Wikipedia article [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George%27s_Day_\(Spain\)), and my fics posted in previous years [here](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/tagged/saint-george's-day). 
> 
> ///
> 
> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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